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As part of an E-marketing project, myself and three other NUI Maynooth students conducted a digital review of brands in the Soft drinks industry both internationally as well as here in Ireland. As students who indulge in a fizzy drink on almost a daily basis, we were keen to learn more about the market and the brands which dominate it.

Our review focuses on five popular Soft Drink brands in both the global and Irish market: Coca Cola, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Irn Bru and Club Orange. We have looked at the performance of the social media platforms of the five brand’s, and have conducted a boss metrics analysis of their respective Facebook and Twitter accounts. Finally, we compiled our findings and presented key insights in a final report.

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The following video highlights each brands respective commitment to social media through facts about each brand and there use of social media.

We conducted our research on the Irish Film Industry, it’s market and who the competitors are. We named our team, TEAM FOUR which included Clare McCourt, Iman Mann, Laura Mooney and Shauna O’Sullivan. As a team we all had a passion for movies and decided to research into the different cinema’s that are currrently available. We used methods such as BOSS Metrics reports, website review, mobile app review, social media review and report promotion. We all worked extremely hard to achieve the results we wanted and are all happy with our assignment outcome.

We conducted our research on the Make-up industry. Our team members were Gillian Lynch- 11323811, Nicola Stafford-11339216 and Leah Hickey-11318401. We decided to call our team “Team Girlo” because we’re all girly girls with a passion for make-up and everything to do with the industry. Through the project we conducted an analysis of the various websites, social media and mobile websites of five companies: M.A.C, Inglot, Clinique, L’Oreal and Fuschia make-up.

Having completed this we found some interesting results. M.A.C turned out the be the best in terms of website and all social media whilst Fuschia make-up was the worst as they lacked many essential tools to promote their brand, including, very importantly a twitter account!

We hoped that through this project we could promote these various companies and we did so in a few ways. First of all we made a YouTube video which summarised our report and findings and conclusions.

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We also created a presentation on our report which will be presented to our social media class and was also published on slideshare.

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To further promote these companies we also posted our presentation into our blogs that we have built up over the past few weeks and onto our twitter accounts.

Through this project we have all gained a deeper insight into the beauty industry and enjoyed conducting the research. We had a lot of fun with this module and learned a lot of new things!

A competitor analysis of the Newspaper Industry was conducted. The five newspapers considered were; The Irish Independent, The Irish Times, The Examiner, The Irish Sun, and The Daily Star.

The market background and the individual profile of each paper were taken into account. The papers were examined through a website review, a social media review and a mobile review. Sites like Facebook and Twitter were used to evaluate for the social media review. The mobile apps were critiqued and also a site called howtogomo.com was used for the mobile review.

We also employed BOSSmetrics.com, an analytical tool, to assess the newspapers use of social media. We found out information like which one has the most followers, at what time of day they publish their posts on Facebook, what kind of content achieves the most likes, etc.

We will monitor the responses to our postings to see if our findings comply with the public perception. As an example of some of the work we’ve been doing, see below for a Youtube video about the topic and a presentation from Slideshare.

This report will offer an overview of the European Airline industry and a profile of five European airlines; namely Lufthansa, Air France, Ryanair, Easyjet and Aer Lingus. The report explores each Airlines engagement with, and use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as their utilisation of mobile applications. The report contains industry data and analysis on each Airlines social media performance by utilising Boss Metrics Analysis.

Social media networks offer the opportunity to build and foster online communities. This will present online prospects to enhance service value by listening to existing and prospective customers discussing the brand and other related matters. An airline can attempt to discover what their customers have in common, as well as issues that customers share with each other. Social media can also be utilised to generate feedback and comment and build customer loyalty and retention.

As a team we have reviewed and researched the sports industry, and in particular the well-known sports brands: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, and Irish brand O’Neills. We have reviewed the companies’ websites, mobile sites as well as their social media pages.

Findings were recorded in a report, and our research was promoted using our own personal Twitter and Facebook pages. We also created individual blogs, a slideshare presentation and created a Youtube video.

Overall, we learnt the importance the internet plays in the daily routine of sports brand companies. Websites allow for goods to be searched, and bought in an online store. A market trend is that of being able to customize goods to the users preference also. Brands use social media to reach a large audience of fans. Promotions and the latest products can therefore be promoted free of charge. Mobile sites are also essential for brands as the smartphone is now a popular device being used by millions of people on a daily basis. The importance of a good site was seen as it keeps users satisfied due to a firm implementing a user friendly mobile site.

Our project was based on five organizations that promote tourism in their respective locations. We chose Discover Ireland, Visit Scotland, Discover NI, Italia and Definitely Dubai as our organizations and examined both their interactions with social media platforms and their websites. Doing so we gained an insight into how these organizations promote themselves and how much of an audience they are achieving.

Using Boss Metrics we were able too see how the more organizations post on Facebook or Twitter the more responsive their recipients become by ‘liking’ or retweeting their content and becoming more involved with the organization. Also using the Boss Metrics we were fit to see that competitions such as that ran by Visit Scotland were highly effective in promoting the organization and raising its online profile.

As part of our E-marketing module we undertook a report to compare the use of social media as an E- marketing tool by a number of companies. As students of Equine Business in NUI Maynooth our area of interest was the equine industry. Therefore we decided to compare Punchestown, Galway, Leopardstown, Curragh racecourses as well as Aintree as a UK comparison.

We chose the above racecourses as they are major players in the racing calendar and hold major festivals. For our comparison of the racecourses online presence, we reviewed their Facebook and Twitter pages, websites, mobile apps and blogs. We used BOSS Metrics analytic software to compare Twitter and Facebook activity. As well as reviewing for the presence of blogs by each racecourse and in most cases there was a lack of them.

We found that in general each racecourse’s online activity increase’s around the time of their respective festivals with activity at other times of year relatively low. We found that Galway best utilise Facebook as a marketing tool with nearly 60,000 fans, while the Curragh best uses twitter with regular tweets and updates. Most racecourse websites were found to be informative and straight forward, with the acceptation of Aintree and Punchestown which was scattered in comparison to other websites. Regards the websites that were smart phone friendly, all were found to be unfriendly for smart phone use accept Leopardstown and Galway with Aintree the only racecourse with a mobile app.

Going forward we recommend all racecourses to keep up to date on social media sites and utilise throughout the entire year.

We have conducted a digital media review of the Irish Alcohol Sector, focusing on popular Beer & Cider brands across their Websites, Mobile and Social Media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. We chose Bulmers Ireland, Heineken, Budweiser, Carlsberg and Guinness Ireland. We then analyzed their data and highlighted some interesting insights; the tables below indicate our findings.

Facebook Analysis

Facebook Top Stories

What we discovered

Heineken has the most fans on Facebook while Bulmers Ireland has the lowest.

Budweiser, Heineken and Guinness use their sponsorship of events to engage customers with their brand.

Budweiser have the highest amount of people talking about them (PTAT) with 5.10% followed by Guinness with 4.52% and Heineken with 3.10%.

However Bulmers and Carlsberg had a poor PTAT rating of 1.6% and 1.5% respectively.

Heineken also have the highest rating for posts with a high number of shares utilizing their large fan base to engage with their larger target audience.

Key Insight

Competitions are used by the 5 companies to interact with customers and photos are the most popular content type.

Bulmers Ireland are not utilising their Facebook page and are not attracting the potential number of customers that they could be.

Although Guinness has a high average of posts per day they have not attracted a large volume of fans on their Irish Facebook page.

Carlsberg should increase their posts per day to get more interactions with fans.

With regards to popularity, in terms of the number of fans, Heineken is the superior page, followed by Budweiser, then Carlsberg, Guinness and lastly, Bulmers Ireland.

While Heineken has the greatest fan base and reach Budweiser is more engaging with their fan base with the highest PTAT rating at 5.1%

Twitter Analysis

Twitter Top Stories

What we discovered

Guinness Ireland has the highest number of followers on Twitter with Bulmers Ireland having the lowest number of followers.

Carlsberg and Heineken Ireland have the highest average tweets per day.

Most of the companies have a good average reply and interaction with customers however Bulmers Ireland has the lowest at 0.1.

Budweiser have the highest weekly mention, spreading their brand further.

Key Insight

Most of the companies use Twitter to promote events that they are involved in with their sponsorship.

Bulmers Ireland has failed to gain followers and interact with customers.

The companies use their Twitter pages for brand promotion by sharing images, videos and competitions.

In conclusion

A strong online presence is important in today’s highly competitive markets, in particular social media. A strong digital media strategy increases brand awareness. Companies cannot afford to ignore the power and popularity of Social Media. All 5 brands have a presence online with areas of strength and weakness. Overall Bulmers Ireland is the weakest across all online media platforms. Heineken have the strongest presence online, with the highest number of fans across combined social media platforms. Budweiser also has a strong presence as they have high levels of engagement as per their number of fans. However presentation can let them down, e.g. their website is cluttered and not user friendly. Guinness appears to target the Irish market best, through sponsorship and promotion and they have the most Irish social media accounts.

For the past few months we’ve been working as a team to create a digital marketing report for our mn319 module. The purpose of the report was to choose the top 5 companies in a particular sector and compare their online presence within the social media hub otherwise known as Facebook and Twitter. The tools we used were Socialmedia.ie’s BOSS Metrics and Google Analytics for our mobile review. Our chosen sector was the Gambling Industry and the companies we compared were: Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, Bet365 and Betfair and BoyleSports.

By no means was this easy and non stressful, but the facts which we stumbled upon during our research made the project extremely interesting and exciting to say the least. As a team ‘’Bonding’’ trip we all headed off to the reputable Punchestown Festival to experience the atmosphere of the gambling world, we think we’ll be making an annual return!

Check out our YouTube video and SlideShare presentation to get a greater insight into our findings.